Infinite scrolling without losing “Page Views” in Google Analytics

Question

Let's say "Page Views" is a very important metric on your website (KPI) but you want to introduce the nice looking infinity scrolling on certain heavily used pages.

What are the possibilities in order to introduce infinite scroll without losing page views, e.g. is there a legal way of resubmitting a page view to Google Analytics?

Answer 1

Yes, you can create virtual pageviews in Google Analytics. When the user goes over a certain point in the page, a pageview is recorded.

You can find information on how to set up virtual pageviews here:

https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/gajs/asyncMigrationExamples#VirtualPageviews

This should be done with JavaScript. jQuery Waypoints is a good library to help:

http://imakewebthings.com/jquery-waypoints/

You should select the virtual URL to put in the code carefully. For example you can set them as subpages of the main page.

_gaq.push(['_trackPageview', '/example-page/point-1']);

_gaq.push(['_trackPageview', '/example-page/point-2']);

_gaq.push(['_trackPageview', '/example-page/point-3']);

Answer 2

If you use jquery infinitescroll plugin to do paging, just try as below:

$('.selector').infinitescroll({
  // other options
  dataType: 'json',
  appendCallback: false,
  nextSelector: '.page-nav:last a',
}, function(json, opts) {
   ga('send', 'pageview', $('.page-nav:last a').attr('href'));
  // Do something with JSON data, create DOM elements, etc ..
});

Answer 3

Easier way to do it, would be setting up a Tag that fires when the URL changes from /page-1 to /p2...n This way it will capture the pageview when the url changes while scrolling. However, if the URL is static (which I highly doubt), you can use the above mentioned JS methods.